


Slow Unfolding Petals

by Kaile (rcs)



Category: Ragnarok Online
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-07
Updated: 2011-04-07
Packaged: 2017-10-17 17:23:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/179216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rcs/pseuds/Kaile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's something to be said for persistance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slow Unfolding Petals

It began-- as so many things in Sellys' life did-- with Halloween dragging her headlong into something she was entirely out of her depth dealing with.

She wouldn't be able to recall later the name or face of the girl Hallo wanted to impress, nor the gift they'd finally decided on. But running into Laszlo for the first time...

Well, no matter how much Halloween might wish it otherwise, she'd never get it out of her memory.

It was pure coincidence that had Laz home with his parents, harangued into "helping out"-- read: flirting playfully with the old ladies and the young girls who came to buy flowers and trinkets for their homes and to peek under their lashes at the Dimirs' handsome son and maybe sell a few. And it was equally pure coincidence that Halloween had bribed his green-haired comrade with strawberry cake to come help him pick out something sure to 'get her skirts all up in a bunch'. After a dry remark about how his hands would probably be doing that, which Hallo came dangerously close to wetting himself over, she'd agreed more out of a sense of 'nothing else to do'; Cessair and Rhys deserved SOME alone time, after all. But the moment they stepped into the sweet-fragranced shop and Laz looked up from grinning at a little girl who had what had to be her entire allowance in hand for a flowercrown... well, Laz was convinced that that was fate.

Sellys was just convinced that she was teetering on the edge of an allergy attack. But later-- much, MUCH later-- she'd agree with Laz just to get him to stop tugging on her hair and nibbling at her neck over it.

\-----

Sellys would have never thought one way or the other about it, if it weren't for the day, a few days later, that Laz-- a friend of Hallo's, or a friend of a friend, or something, since Hallo was willing to name anyone friend who saved him a few zeny and/or got him into the frilly undergarments of a pretty girl, and Laz was capable of doing both-- appeared at the headquarters, stating a need to talk to Hallo. But Hallo was noticably more cynical of this reasoning when Laz had nothing to say and a hothouse flower, a strange, fragrant orange concoction of a tropical thing, for Sellys. And that cynicism only grew as he watched Laz try to converse with the quietest woman he'd ever known, and only half-manage to get words out of her: a polite 'thank you', and a little bit of an uncomfortable fidget.

Eventually it stopped being vaguely amusing to watch someone Hallo thought of as competition for those ladies of the town and became almost embarrassing to watch. Eventually he concocted some flimsy excuse-- "Sellz, Balth is calling you"-- and she fled, casting only a half-glance at Laszlo as she left the room.

He only grinned and waved cheerily. Gods, didn't the man know when he was crashing and burning? He wasn't THAT irresistable.

Or, apparently, that quick to be discouraged. Though Sellys always religiously put the flowers he brought once a week-- he apparently had a lot to talk about with Hallo that Hallo never ended up conversing with him over-- in bowls of water, they weren't anything particularly special to her. Too bright, too fragrant, too much. She threw them out when they began wilting, and didn't think twice about it. She wasn't dense-- she knew what Laz was getting at. And she could still remember a brandy-eyed man and a tryst that had ended painfully, so she chose to ignore it. Besides, the flowers only proved what Sellz knew-- that he didn't understand who she was, hadn't bothered asking a thing. So it wasn't hard to turn him down. Even if he didn't know he was being turned down-- or maybe didn't care.

This might have been the end of it, if it weren't for Cessair and her meddling.

She'd had the pleasure of Laz's company exactly three times. The first, Cessair had watched him hawklike. The second, she'd watched Sellys. The third, she'd found herself a little charmed by the whole thing, rescuing wilted bright things from Sellys' sparsely populated trash bucket and bringing them home, stealing a few of the holy books that Rhys kept in dusty shelves and pressing them. It said something that even Rhys looked at them after hearing from his wife about whence they came and looked up her with guileless green eyes. "They're a little... ostentatious, aren't they? They look like something Thylas might wear." When she got done laughing, Cess had to agree.

"The boy needs help. He'll never get her attention this way." A pause. "If only his family owned a bakery. But I can probably help him out."

\-----

Hallo began first suspecting something was up when Laz stopped showing up with cut flowers the color of tropical drinks and actually asked for Sellys by name, a small potted Hinalle in his hands. She actually looked a little surprised when he pressed it into her hands, twilight-blue eyes smiling at her over the white petals. The scent was delicate, astringent-- it reminded her of white potions, light and airy, and the ghost of a smile played on her lips when he told her it could be used as a reagent for healing compounds. For his reaction, though, Hallo'd think she had just opened her blouse for him-- Laz turned a shade of red around the ears that Hallo hadn't seen on a man before, and smiled down at the tiny swordswoman. What had changed this relatively amusing show so rapidly?

As if there were ever any question, Hallo thought, glancing at Cessair, who was pretending to talk to her husband but watching the two with a distinct expression of satisfaction.

As for Sellys, she just looked thoughtful. But even if Cess usually got the credit for it, Hallo understood that look as well as she did: 'he's finally beginning to figure her out.'

What followed was a slow, careful dance. It was so slow, in fact, that the only hint that there was a dance going on at all was the distinct fragrance of flowers coming from Sellys' room and the suddenly inescapable presence of Laszlo at the headquarters when he wasn't working with his parents. Hallo became rapidly annoyed whenever the dark-haired rogue was floating around, and complained-- often loudly-- at Cessair, who'd hit him and watch the two with a proprietary smile on her face. But no matter how delicate the flower, how sweet the words he said, how attentive Laz was, Sellz didn't seem to be responsive to the romantic overtures that everyone who saw the two saw going on. She'd talk with him, in her quiet way, and she listened to him prattle on about his family and his job and his adventures, and sometimes she'd offer stories of her own. But even Cessair could see that Laz was beginning to falter. What he couldn't see-- what even Hallo couldn't see-- was the look on Sellys' face whenever he left for the evening; it was wistful, a little shy.

As the autumn fell over Aldebaran, sending leaves falling and flowers coming to fruit, Sellys seemed a little more off-balance, and when winter itself hit and the green of the world was replaced with a coat of white in a matter of hours, even Cess could see the way the normally steady rune knight watched the snow fall over their gardens, the petals of a hinalle rolling between her fingers. And when the morning hit and Laz, normally chatting with the little ones when Sellys came down the stairs for breakfast, was nowhere to be seen, Cessair wondered if Sellz had perhaps waited too long.

It took two days of this to finally push Cessair to her wits' end. Citing 'horrible weather' as a reason, she bundled Sellz up in three cloaks-- the greenhaired girl had never been good with the colder weather, citing more comfort with the heat of summer-- and trudged with her across the miles of snow between the headquarters and the city proper. When they'd walked into her house, Cessair had kicked off the snow and called Rhys to put the kettle on. An hour later, when they'd both eaten and were warm, Sellz finally thawed enough to wander around, still looking listless.

And when she came across a dried blue flower in a holy treatise, and then an orange one in a hymnal, it was Rhys who walked up behind her, patting her shoulder as she looked down at the now-muted colors, the softer fragrances.

"It really was a lovely aster," he began, and when Sellys turned to look at him, her eyebrows tilted up in a question, he smiled. "The orange one. You know, it's a talisman of love. The old Rachelians used to use it as a symbol of courtship. A boy would give it to the girl he loved, as a sign of the sincerity of his feelings. And that blue one, the rose-- that one's a sign of love at first sight."

Sellys colored, touching the dried blue petals. She could remember this one-- it had been a surprisingly familiar color when he'd given it to her, until she looked up and realized that it matched his eyes almost perfectly. It made her think of him-- and then it made her think of how oddly disappointed she'd felt when he hadn't come by at his normal time, nor in the days after.

"You know," Rhys began gently, "his parents' store isn't all that far from here. And Cess says dinner won't be ready for a few hours yet. I'm sure she'd appreciate some flowers for the table."

It wasn't until she was latching her cloak and lacing up her boots that Sellys realized that maybe Rhys understood how she was just as well as Cessair and Hallo now, only in a different way.

She'd gotten a little lost, trying to find the tiny shop from months-old memory, but just as she was about to give up and head back, it appeared like a mirage: the windows lit with candles, garlands of dried flowers hanging in the front display. A little bell sung a greeting as she pushed the door open, knocking the snow from her boots at the doorjamb. A cheerful middle-to-upper-aged woman greeted her with a familiar accent, fussing over Sellys in a way she hadn't been fussed over since-- well, since before she came to this place from Veins. Her cloak was unpinned and hung to drip, and the little old woman prattled on in a familiar way about the weather and how quiet it had been.

She seemed surprised when Sellys asked about Laszlo, though. "Oh, are you another of those girls, looking for my suflețel? I'm afraid he's in bed, sick. The silly boy was out most of the day before yesterday in that terrible snow, you know. He said he had a delivery to make, but... I can't think of a customer we'd have that far out! He managed to chill himself before he came home, though-- got lost on the way, I expect." The woman regarded Sellys curiously. "If you'd like, you could visit him. He's been so disappointed that he couldn't make it."

"Ah," Sellys began, ready to decline-- but then she remembered those flowers, once too bright and too fragrant, made dimmer and softer by time. And she remembered that sharp sadness she'd felt when he hadn't been downstairs the morning of the snow.

"I'd like that. Do you... have any dried jonquil?" A plea for returned affection, she remembered dimly from what Laz had told her in those summer days that felt so long ago.

The woman smiled and retrieved a hanging garland, and then showed her into the back rooms she and her family lived in.

He was asleep when she came in, his mother busying herself with hanging the garland on his door and ushering Sellys to the seat beside his bed and thrusting a cup of tea and a piece of cake into her hands. "Sit, sit-- eat. He'll wake up soon enough. He's a very light sleeper, my boy is. Ah, when he does, if you could just-- this tea's a specialty of mine, hinalle and vital flowers. He must drink it, if you could talk to him. He can't resist a girl, you know. Specially," Marija added, a hint of something in her eyes, "one he's gone to such lengths to get to know." At her surprised expression, the woman laughed merrily, patting Sellys' head. "Our boy, he thinks we do not notice our flowers go missing. But they are like children to us, too! Of course we would know when he takes one out to the same place every week."

Moving to the door, she smiled. "Please just be sure he drinks it, draga mea."

Sellys nodded, and when the door closed behind her with a click, Laz stirred, opening one eye.

"Sorry," he began, a chuckle in his voice. "She likes to chat. I get it from her, I guess."

"It's fine," Sellys answered quietly, pressing the tea into his hands as he sat up. "I... find I've grown to like that."

He caught her hand as she pulled back. "And this?"

She blushed, and he thought for a moment that she couldn't be prettier. "And that."


End file.
